


in your heart shall burn

by sunsmasher



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-02
Updated: 2015-10-02
Packaged: 2018-04-24 09:53:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4914970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The conclave is destroyed,” Riza says. Her tone is as cool and unforgiving as everything else in this freezing shithole. “Everyone who attended is dead. Except for you. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	in your heart shall burn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cosmogyral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/gifts).



Roy raises his head when the noise at the door starts and his guards come to a significantly higher degree of attention. The mark on his hand burns like an infection, hot roots of pain plunging through his muscle and bone, stretching towards his heart. He makes a fist and keeps his eyes forward.

The first body through the door is a man in a deep hood and the symbols of the Chantry, a toothpick between his teeth and chainmail draped down to nearly his knees. Roy would take a moment and stare at this man who is so obviously Jean Havoc, except then the second figure clears the shadows around the doorway, and Roy’s life is no longer his own.

Knight—no, _Seeker_ -Commander Riza Hawkeye looks down at her prisoner, whose world is suddenly thrumming like a compass held over the magnetic pole, and her face says nothing at all.

“Comm—“ he starts, mouth shaping the sounds in pure reflex, but she cuts him off.

“The conclave is destroyed,” she says. Her tone is as cool and unforgiving as everything else in this freezing shithole. “Everyone who attended is dead. Except for you. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now.”

For some reason, he’d always imagined he’d be standing when she invariably, inevitably asked him that. Now, bound on his knees on the spine of the Frostbacks, his hands uncurl in helpless shock, and he can’t remember all the ways he’d promised to answer. _I am not control of this situation_ screams a part of his mind, again and again in a rising terror. It’s subsumed by the magnificent hum of _she's alive_

She waits for him to answer, and he wonders if it’s a courtesy on her part to allow him this, a single brief moment to catalogue every harsh change the past four years has carved in her— the armor, the rank, her hair cropped short like when they’d first met, the scar curving under her cheekbone, the gray cavity of her eyes.

Or maybe the courtesy is imagined, and he’s a prisoner at the feet of a Seeker-Commander of the Andrastian Chantry. She nods over his head, and then there’s a fist in his hair, wrenching his neck back.

“Explain this,” she says, nudging at his right hand with the toe of her boot. Her hands are still clasped neatly behind her back. She doesn’t want to touch him. Roy’s breath hisses through his teeth.

“I can’t,” he grits out, over the pain in his neck. Over the pain in his everywhere. “Believe me.” It’s an order and a plea.

She hums tonelessly, and another fist makes an attempt at locating Roy’s kidneys through the flesh of his back. The pain is astounding, and Roy lurches forward, wheezing.

“Seeker…” Havoc murmurs, still pacing the perimeter of the room, but Riza doesn’t acknowledge him.

“The Divine is dead, First Enchanter,” she says instead, and the flush of memory that that title spoken in that voice suddenly evokes is nearly as painful as the thing currently going on with Roy’s spine. “And somehow, you stood where she stood, and you live. And you glow. I need answers.”

“I don’t have any,” Roy gasps, then freezes. His gaze darts up, hunting for hers, eyes starting to go wide. “I can't— I _can_ ’t remember.”

It’s horrifying, once he understands it. He remembers reaching the Conclave. He remembers ducking down a corridor, telling his aide he’d be only a moment. And then he remembers waking up on his knees in a shithole cell with green fire in his hand.

Everything between is black.

“I can’t remember,” he says again, breath starting to go short. The look on his face must be truly wretched, because Riza finally makes some motion from her frozen parade rest, one foot shifting back, chin ticking up.

“Nothing at all?” she asks, as Havoc circles back into view behind her. He’s not so good at schooling his features as she is. His jaw tightens as he glances between Roy and the Seeker-Commander.

 _Mommy and Daddy have gotten in a fight_ , Roy thinks, panic a high white whine between his eyes, and almost laughs.

“I was climbing,” he says to Riza, “in the dark, being chased.” This isn’t memory, what’s coming out of his mouth, what she’s listening to with flat eyes. It’s too muddled, too full of spiders, more dream than not, but it’s all he has to give her. “A woman held out her hand and called to me, and then there was light. And then I was here.”

There’s a startled muttering behind him, one of the guards saying, _a woman?_ before Havoc cuts them off with a glare.

“And the mark on your hand?”

“I don’t know, I can't— _shit_.”

Roy doubles over, cursing breathlessly, as the thing on his hand flares, shooting pain up his shoulder. Riza immediately drops to one knee, watching the way he scrabbles uselessly at his palm with his other hand. Roy is distantly aware of a shaking in the ground as his vision starts to go grey and wobbly around the edges. He hears one of the guards swear behind him, a general clanking as the company tries its collective best to guard against a building coming down around their ears, but it’s soon over. Riza stands and brushes mortar dust from her shoulder in a decisive motion.

“Havoc,” she says, “Take this lot and get to the forward camp. Tell Grumman I’m bringing the prisoner to him.”

Havoc raises an unassuming eyebrow, still chewing at his stupid toothpick. “And if he tries to make an— Ah. Nevermind, forget I said anything.”

“Yes, Jean?”

“Nothing, ma'am. I’m sure you’ve got the prisoner _well_ in hand.”

Riza’s flat stare does nothing to diminish Havoc’s sly, blink-and-you’d-miss-it smirk. He waves a desultory hand at Roy’s guards, who precede him out the doorway. Havoc closes it behind himself without, Roy is grateful to note, any further commentary.

Maybe grateful is too strong a word. Without the noise of five other bodies and their myriad fidgeting, Riza’s silence is deep enough to drown in.

After a long, ponderous moment, in which Roy does little more than search her shadowed face and ache, Riza takes a knee again. “Did you blow up the conclave?” she asks him.

“I don’t know,” he says immediately, despite the horror he feels at his own answer. Riza has never demanded honesty of him, but he’s never thought to give her anything else.

“Did you kill the Divine?”

Roy takes a second longer this time, watching her face. The two of them had believed, back in the old days, as many men had believed: conveniently. The breadth of what Roy suddenly doesn’t know about Riza is staggering, but he suspects she may have taken up all the faith he left by the roadside, these past four years.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “I’m sorry.”

She blinks, and then, seeming to come to a decision, nods. Something about her eases, and her next question comes out with slightly less bite.

“What is the mark on your hand?”

“I don’t know.” Repetition is starting to dull the essential, sickening terror. “It hurts. Beyond that, I have no doubt you know more than me.”

His _as always_ is unspoken, and Riza— oh, she very nearly smiles.

He expects another question, but instead she looks down a moment, breaking away from his stare, and shifts her weight. One thick-gloved hand comes forward, hesitates for a shocky half-second, and then her fingers brush the back of his burning hand. He jumps like she’s scalded him, and immediately can’t believe he just did that.  

Riza, Maker bless her, only smiles, though it’s in some ghosting, unfamiliar way as fleeting as Havoc’s knowing smirk. She cups his hand in her own, more firmly now, with intent, and pulls the glove off her other hand with her teeth. Her calloused fingers brush against his open palm, tracing the amorphous stitching between magic and flesh.

“There’s a rift in the sky a hundred leagues long,” she says to his magicked palm. Roy’s breath shivers between his teeth. “It appeared at the moment the conclave was destroyed, according to everyone left living on the mountain. You appeared in the center of the ruins, dropping from a smaller rift, with something vaguely human-shaped visible behind you before the rift waned. A popular theory is that you were saved from the Fade by Andraste herself.”

Roy’s breath does actually catch at that. He tears his eyes from the vision of his hand in hers, but she doesn’t look up to meet him. “And what’s your theory?” he asks. He wonders if she would have divulged so much had it been another man kneeling in this cell, and thinks not. Honesty always was a sin shared between them.

“I think your mark hurts you when the rifts flare,” she says, still looking at their hands. Roy’s gaze darts from the shadow of her eyes to the pressed line of her mouth, searching, he hopes not in vain, for the language of her he once spoke so well. “There’s an elf out in the fighting, an apostate named Hohenheim— you’ll meet him soon— who thinks you might be able to stop what’s happening. He’s strange, even for an apostate, but I think he’s right.”

She raises her head, eyes finally meeting his, and Roy feels regret like a sudden stab between the ribs. They joked for so many years about running away, about eloping, about leaving Havoc to run the Jader Circle while they went and got married and lived the rest of their days in a little house on the Waking Sea with dogs and trees and children.

They should have done it. They should have done it ten years ago and never come to this place.

“I trust him,” the Seeker-Commander says.

“And do you…?” It’s a pointless question. She can’t possibly answer it.

“I believe you when you say you can’t remember,” she replies, despite him. His hand has closed over hers while neither of them were looking. “I believe that what little you can remember, you told me truly. I saw Andraste behind you myself. I think you might be able to close the rifts, and I think it’d be stupid not to try.”

She pauses, and Roy stops breathing.

“And if we find out that you did destroy the Conclave and kill Justinia, I’ll execute you myself.”

“ _Thank you_ ,” Roy exhales in a hideous, embarrassing rush. Relief makes him shaky, his exhaustion suddenly overwhelming in the abatement of fear. He’ll die by her sword, should it come to it. He’s come so much closer to such uglier deaths. “Thank you, Riza.”

She doesn’t seem surprised by the sound of her own name. Roy is. He’d forgotten he could say it aloud, not just leave it echoing every morning and evening in the caverns of his own head.

The next bit, then, where he leans forward a bare half-inch and presses his cold lips to hers, feels almost instinctual by comparison.

The world is cold and barren and empty of feeling, and then she returns the kiss. It’s just a moment of pressure, a brush of her rough fingertips against his jaw, and then it’s over. She leans back. It was enough. Roy will live another thousand days on the memory of the hitch in her breath as she pulled away.

“I thought you died when the barracks were burned,” he says, because he is unable to stop himself.

She shakes her head, and unlocks his shackles. They make an awful clattering noise when they hit the floor that neither of them notice. “I was trapped for a while,” Riza says, and Roy instantly knows she’s understating the matter, “But Fuery and the other trainees got me out. We found your staff—my father’s staff— in the ruins by the gate. You left it behind.”

Her tone is almost accusatory when she says this, which means she’d thought him dead for four years, too. He leans into her as she helps him to his feet, an act he can only partway blame on the pain in his knees. What a way to live, the way they live.

“I am sorry about that,” Roy says as she waits for him to regain his balance. Being taller than her again feels inappropriate somehow. “I know what it meant to you. I’m told I tried to go back for it at one point, though I can’t remember much of that night.”

“There was a war on,” Riza shrugs. Her hand steadies him at the elbow, and he fancies he can almost feel her pulse through the cheap tatters of his traveling clothes.

“Isn’t there always, this decade?”

“Mmm. I brought it with me, anyways. It’s in my rooms.”

Roy stops and stares. “It was snapped nearly in half! You carried an eight foot stick through four years of fighting on what, the off chance that you could both get it mended and find a battlemage you trusted enough to use it?”

“And it had belonged to my father.”

“… Well, yes, I suppose—”

“And to you.”

Roy grins. “Now that’s hardly playing fair, is it?”

“Not particularly, no.”

She’s smiling, too.

The sky, when Riza pushes the door open, is a sickly green smear around the largest damned Fade rift Roy has ever seen. Light and fire spiral from the clouds in infrequent bursts, hitting the ground with crashes that echo across the valley. Troops in all colors stream past them, the rainbow remains of the Conclave’s many honor guards, running towards the flames and the screaming.

Riza, at his elbow, guides him forward. She doesn’t have to see his face to register his shock. “You always did say you enjoyed a challenge, First Enchanter.”

Her tone is very nearly conversational. Roy grimaces. “I believe that was mostly spoken in the context of finding the one place in the Circle we could have sex without a confused apprentice walking in on us.”

Riza shrugs. She plucks a mage’s staff from the arms of a passing infantrywoman, her arms laden down with seven at the least. Roy nods his thanks as she passes it over. “Now it’s just a bigger challenge.”

“Debatable,” Roy returns, smiling.

Riza pauses a moment, and he follows her gaze up to the seeping wound of the heavens, raining demons onto the mountaintop. “No,” she replies.

“…No. Perhaps not.”

The staff in his hands is a simple thing, the wood rough and sure to give him splinters if he doesn’t wrap the grips soon, but the weight of it is good. The blade trails a spray of fine sparks when he strikes it against the stone.

Riza doesn’t hurry him, but when he looks up, she’s watching him with a certain urgency. Her hands are clasped behind her back again, and the wind picks at the tufts of her hair. Roy swallows around an anxiety he's beginning to think will never leave him.

“And if I should…” he tries, but the rest of the sentence is beyond him. Maybe some things can only be spoken once.

“Yes,” she promises, as serious as war and demons, and Roy holds her certainty in his heart like a talisman.

“Alright,” he says, nodding tightly. “Let’s go.”

They take off at a run.

**Author's Note:**

> this is a gift for emma, because I didn't write it for emma, but also I wrote it for emma.
> 
> a very slightly more in-depth rundown of this AU can be found [here.](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com/post/130244879251/okay-there-is-just-nothing-about-the-dragon)
> 
> I'm on tumblr @[lambergeier](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com)!


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